A Trustworthy Analyst

Hugh Hewitt on Mitt Romney's "Stupid and Insulting Speech":

Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech was simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. On every level it was a masterpiece. The staging and Romney's delivery, the eclipse of all other candidates it caused, the domination of the news cycle just prior to the start of absentee voting in New Hampshire on Monday –for all these reasons and more it will be long discussed as a masterpiece of political maneuver.

So I guess Mike is not to be trusted as an analyst.

I've only read the text, so I can't speak to the "staging and delivery," but unless they were very, very different from Romney's typical staging and delivery, they won't begin to make up for the logical and factual trainwreck that constitute the substance of the speech.

Since Mike did a fine job dissecting Romney's oratory (but read the rest of this post cum grano salis, because according to Hewitt, I'm not to be trusted as an analyst either), I want to take a moment to go meta and think about Hewitt's defense of Romney's speech. It's easy enough to pick off the straightforward untruths which are Hewitt's stock in trade, e.g:

[T]hat tradition [of mixing faith and politics] has allowed America's role in the world to be so unqualifiedly good.

Really, America's role in the world is unqualifiedly good? Unqualifiedly? So not only, for example, was the Spanish-American War good, but unqualifiedly so? Furthermore, there are no distinctions to make between the vague deistic invocations of the leaders of the early republic, and the political Christianity that has only come into vogue since the Carter years?

Or:

Did Romany [sic; though I enjoy the image of Romney as a gypsy] convert anti-Mormon fanatics or secular absolutists? Of course not, but they are very few, though the latter are extremely overrepresented in elite media newsrooms, as I argued on CNN International just after the speech, when the anchors immediately wanted to turn to whether the LDS segregation of priesthood until 1978 would hurt Romney.

The implication is that only an anti-Mormon fanatic or secular absolutist might take issue with the LDS church's pre-1978 position on blacks, which, pace Hewitt, was that they are congenitally evil, not just that they are to be excluded from the priesthood, and that only an anti-Mormon fanatic or secular absolutist might have an interest in whether Romney, an adult Mormon missionary before 1978, endorsed the view that blacks are congenitally evil. (Actually, we have some clues about how Romney felt about his church's switcheroo, and they don't make him look good.)

Or, to get to Hewitt's main point:

Rescuing the campaign of 2008 from the theological inquisition it had sometimes become will be one of the legacies of the speech, as all candidates and many commentators will now simply be able to say: "I agree with Romney and reject the imposition of theological litmus tests on presidential candidates."

Except that the other candidates don't agree with Romney, and aren't likely to stop calling him on his bullshit as long as it helps their poll numbers and hurts his (which might imply that GOP primary voters don't agree with Romney either).

Speaking of bullshit, a close reading of any one of Hewitt's transparently fact-free assertions makes him look like a straightforward, albeit exceedingly bold liar, but taking his body of work together, an alternative form of disrespect for truth is a more apt diagnosis. The key distinction, according to Harry Frankfurt, between liars and bullshitters, is that the former know the truth and accept its authority, if only ultimately to subvert it, while the latter are utterly contemptuous of truth-values in general, as the purpose of their utterances is not to persuade their audience to believe or disbelieve any propositions, but simply to advance an agenda. And that is pretty clearly what's going on with Hewitt. On their faces, none of his claims withstand a moment's scrutiny; but it was never his point to convince anyone of anything in particular. On the contrary, their purpose is to manipulate the media narrative of the Republican race to incorporate the idea that Romney has somehow turned a corner — why, Hugh Hewitt said so, and he's got his finger on the pulse of Republican politics.

I suspect that the dynamics of the campaign have shifted so completely against Romney that his partisans' prevarications won't do anything to save him. But Hewitt, whose true calling is really to be editor of Pravda circa 1975, should take solace. The front-loaded primaries system, in conjunction with the Feiler Faster phenomenon, suggest that there will be plenty of time for Hewitt to prostrate himself before the eventual nominee, disclaim his prior affiliation with Romney, and probably rattle off a book about how our children's and grandchildren's security depends upon electing [Name TK]. Hell, there's probably a draft in his office somewhere, waiting for a universal find-and-replace command and shipment over to Regnery.